Posts Tagged ‘biceps’

Biceps. The ultimate show muscle. From age 10 on, every boy, teenager, and man want to have bulging biceps. This is, apparently, a true sign of manliness and strength.

Biceps are among the most famous muscles in the body. When somebody asks you to “make a muscle” or “flex”, they aren’t asking you to flex your hamstrings. They want to see your biceps!

This whole notion of flexing the biceps as a measure of anything, is completely ludicrous to me, but it is a reality. When someone asks me to flex, I ask them if they’d much rather discuss max effort PRs, perhaps dynamic powerlifting strategies, or better yet how to put together the most effective HIIT complexes. Most folks walk away thus. But I digress…

Who doesn’t want bigger, stronger arms? Almost everyone who lifts weights will, at some point, do exercises for their biceps and triceps. Unfortunately, doing the same old curls and push downs won’t produce the results you want. If you are stuck in an arm-building rut, use the following six exercises to breathe life back into your workouts.

Biceps

Arguably the most famous muscle in your body, if you ask a child to show you a muscle, they’ll probably throw up an arm and do a biceps pose. Make your biceps something to be proud of by adding these unusual exercises to your arm training program.

Weighted pull-ups

The biggest drawback of most curling exercises is that the amount of weight you can lift is limited by your ability to keep your body upright. Weighted pull-ups eliminate this problem so you are free to focus on curling your chin up to the bar.

Start out by strapping on around ten percent of your body weight, so if you weigh 80 kilos, grab a 7.5-10 kg dumbbell or weight plate. There is no need to be exact; round up or down according to the weights you have available.

Grab the pull-up bar with an underhand, shoulder-width grip. Without kicking with your legs, smoothly curl your chin up to touch the bar. Slowly extend your arms and repeat. Sets of 4-6 are ideal with this exercise.

Grip training: it has to be the most ignored type of training in gyms all over the World. Seriously, how often will you see someone working on their grip in the gym? Almost never, right? No one really seems to care. How much you bench press is all that really matters anyways – which is sarcasm, if you didn’t catch the drift.

While grip training does not really have much of an impact on how much you can lift, it still can be important. A lot of people use straps as an excuse not to work on their grip. I mean you can deadlift 600 lbs with straps, so why would you work on grip? Well, if you are ever planning on entering some type of powerlifting competition, then you will not be allowed to use them.

How to Develop a Strong Grip

The only way to make sure you get a more effective grip is to just work on your forearms with grip training. This can be done with any type of forearm exercises really. When you are doing deadlifts, you should try to never progress without straps.

It may be a pain in the ass not being able to bust past a plateau because your grip keeps giving out, but that is why you have to keep working on it! Don’t be that guy who can deadlift 500 lbs with straps but can only deadlift 3 plates without them.

Every serious lifter would love to have massive forearms. It just adds to an already good physique, and would seemingly increase all of your other pressing lifts as well. The problem that most people have is that they aren’t sure how to attack their forearms. Either that, or they are not as consistent with their forearm training.

Forearms should be trained just as often as any other muscle. It shouldn’t just be something you work every couple of months whenever you are bored. Take your forearm training seriously, and you will be on the right path to adding some size on them.

How to Get Big Forearms

Many people think they have to do only direct forearm exercises such as wrist curls, and those will work to an extent, but with forearm training, you have to think outside the box and dumb things down. What is the one major exercise that requires you to have some strong ass forearms? Did I hear someone say deadlifts? That is correct.

Deadlifts, just like they work every other muscle in your body, they also work your forearms. Many people don’t get this much work because they decide to use straps whenever they go heavy. If you can deadlift a ton of weight without straps, then you are sure to have a great grip and huge forearms.

Aside from deadlifts, which you will read about more in a minute, I want to introduce you to 5 other exercises and a variety of techniques that you can use to build great size and strength in your forearms.

As most of you know, I am not a huge advocate of biceps training. I think the biceps get worked pretty hard in you train your back correctly using pull ups, chin ups, and various rows. See my post on the top 5 best back exercises.

In reality you probably only like 4-6 total sets of biceps training a week. That would be 2 sets for 2 or 3 exercises a week, spread out over the course of the week. Choose your biceps exercises based on my list of the top 5 best biceps exercises.

At least if you are going to train your bis, whether twice a week or with a dedicated arms day consisting of 8 biceps exercises, let me tell you how to get the most out of each rep.

I get plenty of questions in various comments throughout the website, but I also get comments and questions via the Project Swole Contact Form.

Generally I address those questions through e-mail, but often I do not have the time to reply to each and every question personally.

From now on I want to take a more proactive approach to answering Your Health Questions by posting them separately in the blog. This way we can be sure that everyone benefits from the Q & A.

JD wrote:

“I know you don’t approve of an “arms” day, but I’ve always had more trouble adding mass and strength to my arms, as opposed to my torso.

I started including an arms day into my routine for the past 4 or 5 weeks in an effort to combat my naturally scrawny arms. I’ve seen definite progress with my triceps, but no matter what I do, I can’t seem to improve my biceps.

I do several relevant compound exercises during the rest of the week (chin-ups, bent-over barbell rows, close-grip cable rows, etc.), in addition to my arms workout.